Growing Plants and Learning 4 Facts

This last week started off with something different as we went to see the Jr. High's play/musical rehearsal. They were performing Seussical Jr. a play with the story line of Horton Hears a Who but with other Dr. Seuss characters. The students became very excited about the play and I believe some of them went to see the actual performance on Wednesday night. As far as the classroom goes, the students started a new unit in science this week all about Plants. We started off discussing what the essential resources are that a plant needs to live and grow. These elements are air, water, sunlight and soil. We also talked about the parts of a plant and what they do to help bring in nutrients around the plant to allow them to grow. The students were very excited about this unit because they get to actually grow some different plants and observe them over the three week period. The students are doing an experiment to see whether beans will germinate the fastest in total sunlight, some sunlight, or no sunlight at all. They are also watching how Spider plants grow roots just by sitting in water. Next week the students will be planting more tiny seeds and observing how they sprout and grow.

A Simple Short Week

Well the ladies made it to state in basketball with their victories at regionals so this week was cut short. We have Thursday and Friday off this week so the students were only here today and yesterday. Even though it was a short week though, we still got a lot accomplished. The students still took their spelling test this week on Wednesday and we went over some more math. The best part about this week though was that we have finally begun our writing genre studies. The students received their own Writer's Notebook in which they can write their drafts and pre-writing. This week we focused on learning about Narrative paragraphs. We began by reading a story called Gloria from The Stories Julian Tells. We then discussed what components of a paragraph make a great narrative. The students actually came up with everything I wanted them to know such as it tells about an event in your own life, uses I, we, us and is in sequential order (first, next, then, last). The students were able to do their first pre-writing activity and complete their first rough draft before the week ended. I am really excited about the writing notebooks and I think the students are too!